Bonnet, Charles

« an entomologist.

One is the importance of classification.

The second is the idea that there are no gaps in nature. Between any two differently classified items, an intermediary item can be found. In the Essai de psychologie and the Essai analytique sur les facultés de l'âme , Bonnet put forward a sensualist psychology, like, for instance, Hartley and Condillac .

Sensations consisted in the vibration of nerve fibres in the brain.

Once a ‘virgin fibre' had first been caused to vibrate by an external stimulus, it could subsequently vibrate for internal reasons, giving rise to other types of mental phenomena.

We pass smoothly from sensations to ideas.

In developing this conception, Bonnet used the same model as Condillac: that of a statue successively presented with simple sensations of smell. In spite of his speculative physiological account of sensation and other mental operations, Bonnet was not a materialist.

On the contrary, he held that sensation required the activity of the soul, which, though linked to the body at a certain point in the nervous system, was an eternally existing ‘germ' .

(Bonnet did not have a fixed view about where this point was situated.) Thus, Bonnet's psychology included an application of his general doctrine of ‘preformation' , already envisaged in his entomological work.

He considered that the parthenogenesis of aphids demonstrated the existence of preformed germs of organisms in the female germ cell.

In his Considérations sur les corps organisés , he argued against epigenesis, the view that ontogenesis could be explained in some mechanical or developmental fashion, and maintained that from the time of creation, the universe contained a multitude of preformed ‘germs' , whose future development was already built into them.

These ideas were brought together in an even more elaborate synthesis in the La Palingénésie philosophique .

Here we see the ‘Great Chain of Being' presented in dynamic form.

We see an eschatological cosmology spread over time: the history of the earth consists of a series of cataclysms in which all organic life is destroyed, except the germs themselves.

Over time, at each moment of rebirth, the germs produce a new and more perfect instantiation of what was already built into them at the moment of creation, until the final state is reached through the resurrection (or ‘palingenesis' ) announced in the Christian gospel. Bonnet also produced an apologetic work, Recherches philosophiques sur les preuves du christianisme (Philosophical Investigations into the Proofs of Christianity) (1770) in which, apart from reproducing some of the traditional proofs, he explained miracles, not as divine interventions in the natural order, but as apparently anomalous events which were already provided for at the moment of creation.

His moral philosophy, developed in Philalèthe (before 1783), goes from the avoidance of pain and the search for pleasure, through self-love, but claims that this pre-utilitarian conception has its place in a divinely planned order.

The ‘invisible hand' of Adam Smith is the hand of God. The grandiose system which Bonnet developed was widely influential in his day.

But perhaps his more lasting philosophical impact arose from his detailed physiological theory of sensation, which influenced Cabanis and. »